Chapter 29

Luke hadn’t forgotten his first few fights, when everything was a higher level than him. He remembered how scared he was, but that memory was dull and faded. He’d killed a thousand monsters in the last few weeks. This was just one more fight.

At least, that’s what he thought right up until the goblin brought the sword down on him. Luke swung his mace up to parry the blade and force it aside with plans to follow up by heel-kicking the goblin’s knee while it was off-balance. Then steel met steel, his mace was thrown back, and it was all he could do to hang onto it.

The goblin’s sword bore down, and Luke’s leg nearly buckled from the strain of holding it back., even for a second. His arms were going to give out in moments, and he had only a fraction of a second to decide his next move. [Mace Mastery] told him how to angle his weapon so that the sword slid down towards the end instead of up to slice off his fingers, but it also told him the weapon could get locked up on the head of the mace itself.

If that happened, there was a very real possibility the goblin would rip his mace out of his hands, and Luke wasn’t nearly so confident in himself that he thought his rank 1 [Unarmed Martialist] skill would see him to victory.

Mace work alone wasn’t going to help him disengage. He tilted the mace and the sword scraped down the length of the handle. Before it could catch on the head, Luke shoved forward to push the sword back, then turned in a spin that flung him away from the goblin. It wasn’t surprised by the move, didn’t falter for even a moment. It simply pursued, its sword deadly fast and already coming back at him in a lunge.

Luke had been trying to put some distance between himself and the goblin, give himself that momentary window to react so that he could dodge instead of pitting his strength stat against the monster’s. It was obvious from just their one exchange that he was losing there, something that had never really happened to him before.

The goblin had seen through that tactic. Rather than having to shuffle forward to chase him down, it turned its attack into a full body lunge that was dangerously close to skewering him almost before he even saw the attack. [Twitch Reflexes] got him out of the way, but it was [Unarmed Martialist] that kept him from falling on his ass doing it.

The goblin kept up the pressure, but Luke could tell it lacked the agility he had. It was compensating for that with sheer skill, or perhaps simply a higher ranked [Sword Mastery] skill. It was hard to tell where the lines blurred between natural skill achieved through study and practice and system granted skill, especially on another creature.

Either way, Luke settled into a rhythm of dodging or redirecting attacks while his [Counter] skill searched for an opening. The goblin might have strength in spades, but Luke was no lightweight either. He could crack skulls quite easily; he just needed the opening. The goblin didn’t look like it was going to slip up and make a mistake though.

If that wasn’t enough to worry about, there was a full hunting party behind it who could jump in at any moment. It was in Luke’s best interest to look like he was losing the fight right up until he killed the goblin with a single decisive blow. That way, they’d be content to stand back and watch their leader beat Luke’s ass.

It wasn’t much of an act either. The damn goblin was seriously good with that weapon, better than anything else he’d ever fought. It was looking less and less like it was going to make a mistake and trigger [Counter], and if Luke planned on using it, he’d need to make an opening.

The problem with that was that he physically wasn’t strong enough to push the sword aside. If the goblin didn’t want it to move, it wasn’t going to. The best he could do was change the angle of descent by locking his own weapon against it, but then he was so tied up in controlling the sword’s angle of attack that he had no way to fight back.

He danced backwards, avoiding a series of probing thrusts, any of which he probably could have swatted to the side with ease if it was anyone else holding the sword. He didn’t, and the goblin wasn’t trying all that hard to make contact. What it was doing was maneuvering him, backing him into a proverbial corner and eliminating his options.

Luke scrambled to find a way out and saw a single possible avenue that would require careful and deliberate set up, and leave him vulnerable to a retaliatory attack if he didn’t kill the goblin in one blow. Then his foot slipped in the mud and he went down to one knee. Against nearly anything else, he would have been able to recover, but not this goblin.

It was higher level, stronger, just as combat-oriented as he was. It probably had a ton of personal experience garnered over years of bloody battles, something Luke was completely outclassed in. He looked up and saw death coming for him in a whistling arc of steel.

He swung his mace up to meet the sword and activated the one thing that might save him. With one foot still solidly planted on the grass, [Power Strike] streamed up through his arms and doubled his strength. The weapons crashed into each other so hard Luke was momentarily deafened and, even from his position on the ground, he overpowered the goblin’s strength and the sword went flying away.

A wave of exhaustion washed over Luke, but he didn’t stop. There was no time for stopping. It was now or never. He surged up to his feet and spun once to whip up some momentum before smacking his mace into the goblin’s chest. It got its hands up to grab the head of the mace, but it was still reeling from the [Power Strike] and Luke hit it hard enough to throw it through the air, where it slammed into a tree in an explosion of bark and wood shards.

The goblin slumped to the ground with a groan, and two of the warriors leaped forward to defend it. Before they could reach their fallen leader, Luke rushed forward and brought his mace down again. The goblin’s skull exploded in a shower of gore and he heard the notification ding in his head.

“Holy shit, that was wild,” Luke said, his chest heaving. He’d used [Power Strike] a few times to get a handle on how the skill worked before, but this was his first time in a fight. It was somehow even more draining. He hadn’t wanted to use it precisely because of the side effects. He could still fight, but there were eight more goblins in front of him.

It was too late for their leader, but those other warriors didn’t look like they were going to just let Luke go. He straightened up, picked off a chunk of goblin skin that had gotten stuck on his cheek, and said, “I don’t suppose you guys want to keep up the one at a time thing?”

Whatever the goblins said, he didn’t get a word of it. The intent was clear though. They spread out enough to avoid getting tangled up in each other’s attacks, and then on some unseen signal, both swung at the same time. Luke hopped backwards out of range and gave silent thanks that they were using normal goblin-sized swords.

When the next set of attacks came, he was pleased to find that they didn’t have the same overwhelming strength of their leader. Luke slipped into something closer to his usual style, where he relied on skills like [Peripheral Awareness] to keep track of multiple enemies and [Twitch Reflexes] to keep him out of the way of incoming attacks. [Counter] more than made up for its earlier failures and he found plenty of openings. The two goblins were both skilled and Luke worked hard to stay ahead of their attacks, and when he did find an opening, they were quick to dart out of the way. Most of his swings missed completely, and those that did connect were glancing blows.

Even a glancing blow with a weapon as heavy as his wielded by someone with 24 strength could break bones. Things started to go sideways when he broke one of the goblin’s arms, and rather than continue to fight, it rotated out to let a new warrior take its place. This one was using a spear instead of a sword, and Luke had to adjust to that new attack vector on the fly.

In a way though, the switch was a blessing. These two goblins weren’t nearly as coordinated, and he was easily able to grab the haft of the spear below the head and swing it around with one arm. The goblin went flying with a startled shriek and splashed into the stream. Luke whipped the spear around to crack the remaining goblin in the face, then spun it and skewered the monster before it could recover.

In his experience, goblins were cowardly and usually scattered as soon as he killed a few of them. He was surprised they were still standing their ground, but one or two more kills would probably be enough to cause the rest to flee. The dog handlers looked like they were ready to break already, and only the intimidating presence of that other high leveled goblin standing behind them kept them in place.

That one was a strange one. The other warriors were wearing expressions that varied from enraged to predatory. He understood that look; it was one he wore himself quite often. That was the look of someone sizing him up and estimating how much XP they were going to get for killing him. That last goblin though, it didn’t look like that. Instead, it looked thoughtful, calculating even.

That worried Luke. It wasn’t scared, and it wasn’t pissed off. It was planning something. Whatever it was trying to do, it wouldn’t be good for Luke if it succeeded. He needed to end the fight, kill the dogs, and get the hell away before the goblins wore him down enough to make a mistake.

The goblin he’d thrown into the water was making its way back out, swimming upstream against the current to try to angle itself behind Luke. That was actually a pretty good strategy he hadn’t expected, but it only encouraged him to get a bit aggressive to end the fight quickly. Luke pushed forward, hunched his shoulders to accept the smack of a spear haft on them when the goblin tried to slash at him while he was stepping into range, and brought his mace up in an underhand swing that clipped its chin.

It went up a few feet, then back down in a sprawled boneless heap. Luke spun in place to meet the attack he knew was coming from the other goblin, only to find it had completely missed the opening to gawk at the remaining goblins. Luke couldn’t really blame it, all things considered. The higher level one had just killed all three of the dog handlers with its axe, and the dogs too!

It stepped forward and brought the axe down on the one whose arm Luke had broken, then it looked back to the fight and smirked. The goblin he’d been fighting shouted something at the traitor, but Luke wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass by. He killed it with a single blow to the back of the head, then stepped back warily to keep the swimmer from circling around him while he faced the traitor.

The goblin glanced down at its companion still in the water, its face twisted in clear disgust, and shook its head. It hefted the leader’s sword over its shoulder, saluted Luke with its axe, and stepped back into the trees. Luke watched it disappear, then looked over at the single remaining goblin. It floated, stunned into inaction, and the current started carrying it away. The goblin didn’t try to fight it anymore and soon enough it was a hundred feet downstream.

Just like that, Luke was safe. He let out a short laugh full of disbelief, uttered a final, “What the fuck?” to the battleground, and walked away.